“[It’s] been very touching to have people appreciate what I do enough to voice an opinion about it,” Roy Wood Jr. says of the response to him leaving The Daily Show. Wood announced his surprise departure from the Comedy Central series earlier this month, citing his desire not to stick around as a correspondent if he wasn’t being tapped to host the show. (No one has yet been tapped, for the record.) It’s a tough call for someone who had publicly expressed interest in taking the job, but Wood remains remarkably pragmatic about the situation, stressing to Rolling Stone that it’s the network’s decision who gets to host, not the show’s.
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It was his uncertain future with the program that caused Wood to walk away, he explains: “There’s a world where I still get offered the show, and there’s a world where I get offered something else. But I just know that to figure out what I want to do next, just as a contingency and cover my own ass, I can’t do that while I’m doing my job as correspondent. It would disrespect the job of correspondent.”
Wood views all his opportunities—from being a Daily Show correspondent to hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to his many years of stand-up—as a way to both sharpen his skills and as a way to leverage himself into new positions. And even though he feels plenty prepared to sit in the Daily Show host chair, he doesn’t see himself as entitled to it. “I’ve never looked at the chair as anything that I deserve. I got eight years of, as Ronny Chieng calls it, the best job in comedy,” he shares. “As weird as it sounds, I am thankful. Because now everyone knows that I can do the thing, and there are many channels.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Wood says Trevor Noah taught him the lesson of “Knowing when to leave,” his thoughts on Hasan Minhaj’s scandal, and shared his observations on the state of the industry. “I do think now they’re going to use economics to justify cuts,” he said of the lack of diversity in late night. “It’s an easier way to say that something isn’t racist when you just go, ‘Oh, we don’t have the money!’ I will say that women have it worse than men. Every woman late-night host you can name in the last five to eight years, the show was created. They did not inherit anybody’s chair. Other than Jade Catta-Preta and The Soup, and that’s not necessarily late night, I can’t think of another woman who took over for a man. I think women are in a really fucked position.”
And of course, he expressed his gratitude for the fans who advocated for him to inherit The Daily Show gig, even if he doesn’t share their anger at the situation. “Traveling the last four days straight and talking to strangers in airports about it has been a little—difficult isn’t the word, but people don’t know how to approach me because they don’t know what state I’m in,” Wood says. “Some people will come up and say, ‘Man, go do your thing!’ and others will come up and they’re almost in mourning, like I posted about my dog dying or something. I’m fine. I’m thankful. I had a job for eight years, bro. That’s an excellent run.” Read the full interview here.